Yesterday I found and downloaded the WP Greet Box plugin from Omni Noggin. This plugin could be a very useful tool and keeping visitors from various sites, asking them to subscribe to your RSS feed.

A great feature of this plugin is the ability to allow or disallow a user to remove the banner if they so choose to. Another great example is the different icons and text that show up from where the user come from. For example if this post was to get tweeted by yourself or any reader, and one of your followers clicked on the link, a Twitter icon and the associated text would show up on the post.

So far I am really liking this plugin! I have only had it one day, and haven’t played or tweaked with the options. But, you can add in your own icon’s and text from what ever referral site you like that may not be included in the plugin default. That’s cool!

I am going to have to give this plugin a rating of 5 stars. If you liked this post and you’ve download the plugin, please tweet it & head to WordPress.org and vote for this plugin.

There is a really neat plugin named Twitip-ID for WordPress. As you can see, if you have commented on this site I was using this plugin.

While it is still in beta testing I feel that it is a really nice plugin, plus it will automatically put the required field into your comments template without any editing. I choice to to manually input the field for custom css and styling.

This plugin is really awesome and allows for other to employ their Twitter ID for other to follow them, giving a little more incentive for people to comment:).

Custom Fields Taking Over

But I have been having a little problem. The Twitter ID’s are generated and stored into the post’s meta as a custom field. Im not sure if I am the only one affectied by this, but as time passed the custom fields generated by commentators started to take over the drop box, and wouldn’t allow the regular custom fields I use to show.

Another think i would like to touch base on is the fact that even if a comment got cought and filtered through Akismet, the custom field of some spammy email address and aa value close to SncSJHfd6sNSs was still generated and stored in the Database of the post..

So from my perspective, I am going to deactivate this plugin at this time and hope the the next releases with touch base on some of these issues.

Update:

Following a message I posted on the WP Twitip ID forum, Andy Bailey replied:

I am working on an update to the twitip plugin. at the moment it is only at beta stage and I have a few things I want to add or change for a proper release. I will get on it as soon as I can!

Many weblog sites these days have some form of an archive page. In WordPress it might be the built in auto generation of permalinks by: /Month/ and /date/.

But in some blog’s, for instance this one here (as I said in a previous post) you can’t get the post to paginate or link to http://youblog.com/page/2 if you have nice permalinks active or http://youblog.com/?paged=2.

By any means, In this theme I have to have an archive link at the bottom. So..

Archive WordPress Plugins

There are many plugins which allows you to automatically create an archive page. The good thing is that you’ll (almost) have nothing to do, and the bad thing is that you may not be able to customize your archives much.

On this blog I have decided to use Clean Archives Reloaded by Viper007Bond. Which you can now see active in my Archive’s page.

If you want to use a plugin, here is a small list:

• Clean Archives
• Extended Live Archives
• Simple Yearly Archive

And of coarse you can always..

..do it your self!

First you would have to create a template file by writing this:

<?php
/*
Template Name: Archive page
*/

//please add you necessary code here
//ie. your hooks and html code ?>

<ol id="archive">
<?php $paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;
query_posts(array(
    'showposts' => 100,
    'offset' => 10,
    'order' =>'DES',
    'paged' => $paged,
    ));
    $wp_query->is_archive = true; $wp_query->is_home = false;

    if( have_posts() ) : while( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>

    <li><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>"><?php $tit = the_title('','',FALSE); echo substr($tit, 0, 25); ?>...</a> - Posted on <?php the_time('j F Y') ?> - Comments (<?php echo $post->comment_count ?>)</li>

<?php endwhile; endif; ?>
</ol>

?>

You may notice this code: <?php $tit = the_title('','',FALSE); echo substr($tit, 0, 25); ?> from a previous post!

Once saved and pasted it to your archives.php or template-archives.php file, upload it on your wp-content/themes/yourtheme/ directory.

Then, in WordPress dashboard, create a new page, name it “Archives” (or whatever you want) and select Archive page as your page template.

enjoy!